Veronica’s experiences in Africa constitute her as a subject of law rather than as an agent of freedom because she is unable to make the imaginative leap required of her as a pedagogue. The social disorder that has erupted as a result of the strike finds no concrete or active echo in her. She remains peripheral to these events, waiting on the sidelines, justifying her passivity as a covert strategy of“investigation”and“objectivity” (270/150–51), while maintaining her posture of self-deprecation and derision. Veronica thus comes across as a teacher who upholds the order of power and fails miserably at helping her students articulate their grievances. Failure to grieve for her own sense of racial and social losses makes her unable to hear the legitimate questions that Birame III and the other students put to her, and unable to recognize the structure of grievances that is in fact their common lot. The disappearance and death of Birame III and the arrest of the proctor, her friend Saliou, provide her with tragic opportunities to ask more questions. But she is incapable of doing so and remains inert, at an impasse.

It must be noted however that the book Heremakhonon begins with an epigraph from the philosopher Pascal: “Je crois volontiers les histoires dont les témoins se font égorger” [I am willing to believe the stories whose witnesses have their throats cut]. This paratextual element suggests that the author is signaling to her readers the importance of making the imaginative leap that the character of Veronica cannot. As Lorraine Piroux has shown in her book, Le livre en trompe l'oeil ou le jeu de la dédicace, dedications and, by extension, epigraphs establish a contract between author and reader, and articulate an oppositional aesthetic that undoes the textual order of narrative representation. Pascal’s statement, in such a reading, would require of Condé’s reader that he or she make a Pascalian leap of“faith” (“je crois volontiers”) in the plausibility of the counternarratives about the deaths of innocent citizens and about the oppositional practices of the powerless under the official appearance of calm and order. The epigraph warns the reader that Veronica Mercier is an unreliable narrator whose unhappiness and subjection to official power feeds a form of melancholic narcissism.

Véronica is a classic example of the Freudian melancholic subject who maintains a stance of self-deprecation and derision because she is unable to mourn for her own lost“origins.”According to Freud, the melancholic subject's“complaints are really‘plaint’ [or ‘plainte’] in the old sense of the word. [She is] not ashamed and [does] not hide [herself], since everything derogatory that [she says about herself] is at bottom said about someone else.”Freud's argument that the melancholic subject suffers from a displacement of affect points to the fundamental confusion or identification between the subject and her object of derision and resentment. When she accuses the citizens of Africa of dissimulation and cowardice, “ils sont restés derrière leurs portes closes, couchés sur leur grabat”[they remained behind closed doors, lying on their lice-infested straw beds (176)], instead of engaging in massive protest against the regime of“Law and Order,” it is her own passive behavior that she is implicitly and ultimately condemning.

In the end, Veronica leaves Africa behind but this“abandoned object” (Freud 248) is figuratively retained within her psychic economy in the person of the“balayeur de la rue de l'Université” (312) [streetcleaner on the Rue de l'Université (176)], whose quiet presence concludes the narrative. Her melancholic ego continues to be haunted by this figure of a “brother” who, one might argue, is but a projection of both her dead student Birame and her dead friend Saliou.

Condé's novel thus thematizes a crucial link between the experience of unresolved grief and the articulation of social and political grievances. Véronica's return to Paris and her reinsertion into the present time of the immigrant experience is but a provisional solution to the dilemmas of racial and political injustice that continue to haunt and trouble her.

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